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Of many of the features of the English Road we can determine the origins at once, for they are of common knowledge. The “blindness” of the English Road is due to the enclosures and the consequent increase in hedges since the seventeenth century, coupled, as I have said, with the dying out of “champion” or “co-operative” open-field farming. It is in part due, also, to that which has also been alluded to and has affected the English Road in all its aspects (surface, variation of gauge and gradient, tortuousness, etc.), the government of the squires following on the defeat of the monarchy nearly three hundred years ago. I shall touch on this again when I come to the history of the English Road.
But, apart from these obvious and well-known causes, two causes much less familiar—and yet of the first importance—two causes peculiar to this island in all Europe, have governed its development: waterways and domestic peace.
The English road system has been so powerfully affected by these two agencies—the one physical, the other political—as to have become wholly differentiated by them from the systems of the Western Continent. The natural feature then is the omnipresence of waterways throughout the island; and the political feature is domestic peace—that is the absence since the modern development of roads began (during the last 250 years) of strategical necessities on a large scale.